You could almost hear the sighs of disappointment echoing around television and radio studios yesterday morning as the threatened flooding of a power station in Gloucestershire failed to occur. One reporter for the Radio 4 Today programme was embarrassingly corrected by the Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Tim Brain, as she breathlessly reported that hundreds of thousands of people had come within two inches of losing their power supply. Actually, the chief constable gently corrected her, the river was three feet away from flooding at the power station: it was only where she stood, farther along the river, that the water was two inches below the quay.

I hate to intrude on the British love of a disaster, but haven’t the emergency services done brilliantly? Far from the “1m victims of the deluge” promised in a Daily Mail headline yesterday morning, there are 350,000 people without tapwater, but not without drinking water, 50,000 were without power for 24 hours, and 10,000 have been moved out of their homes. As I write, we do not know of anybody who has died as a direct result of the floods. Strenuous work overnight by the military and the fire service saved the power station from flooding.

Properties have been ruined, and it is miserable for those who have been hit, but they will be fixed. Insurance companies will cough up; a government emergency fund will have to be established to make up the shortfall. Ministers have some hard questions to answer about who will bear insurance risks in flood-prone areas in future – but those questions were there before this summer. The cost of flooding in areas susceptible to it is already shared among nearly all household insurance policies, at risk or not.

I suspect that farmers with devastated crops and presumably dead livestock will bear the brunt of the real financial damage. But without in any way demeaning the nuisance and misery caused to hundreds of thousands of people in Central England; if this is a disaster, I am a tomato.

The Government has proved itself calmly competent. Those of us (myself included) who feared that Gordon Brown might lack the necessary “feel your pain” contortions of Tony Blair in an emergency have been proved wrong: the pragmatic, unhysterical approach of the new Prime Minister has suited the country well. No soundbites; no grimaces; no posturing.

The temptation to halt the government programme for a few days was impressively resisted. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, has appeared plausible, measured and reassuring. It has been hard even to drum up a real chorus of disapproval at David Cameron’s decision to go ahead with a long-planned trip to Rwanda. What good could the Leader of the Opposition do here? Stick his finger in the dyke?

It is with increasing desperation that reporters around Central England have sought people to attack the emergency services. One journalist was even reduced to reporting on the rescue of a couple who had previously, stubbornly, refused to be rescued, and their pet budgie. But everyone who wanted out seems to have got out in time. Even in the areas without water, families were being “confined” to nine litres of bottled water a day. There is more in the emergency bowsers, and yet more on its way.

One mother complained that her husband wouldn’t be able to wash; if that is the limit of the discomfort in what are quite exceptional circumstances, then I think we can heave a sigh of relief. Perhaps someone might like to hand out water purification tablets. If water purified by a pill is good enough for even sanitised Westerners to drink in the more disease-ridden parts of the Third World – and it is – then surely we in England could manage to wash our bodies in it.

These floods ought to remind us how very fortunate we are. The rarity of the situation, and the impressive response of all the services, shows what a fine country we live in, and at what a fine time. Who would have believed that a government body, the Environment Agency, could have successfully predicted with such impressive detail, the minute variations that might cause waters to rise at a given point many hours hence? I take my rainhat off to them.

It was striking, watching report after report from the flood-hit areas on Monday night (in, admittedly, the comfort of my nice, dry sitting room), that the young and the elderly were the most sanguine about the rising waters. For the young and able-bodied, without small children to worry about, it is an adventure, of course. They were out there, helping or playing. But the elderly, whom you might expect to be frightened and upset, were the toughest of the lot. It’ll pass . . . we’ve done what we can downstairs . . . someone brought me a nice, hot meal. I sometimes shudder to think what my overpampered generation, accustomed to no real material deprivation, with no experience of war or tragedy on our doorsteps, will be like when we hit old age.

Perhaps it is trite to point out that people around the world are not so lucky. I hope not. Hundreds of people have died in flooding in Asia in the past few weeks: 750 in India, 150 in China, 350 in Pakistan.

Millions are homeless. Flooding in Bangladesh kills hundreds every year and displaces millions more. No insurance company is going to rebuild their homes. And we in the UK do not generally care very much.

According to the World Health Organisation, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases; 90 per cent are children under 5, mostly in developing countries. Nearly nine in ten of those are attributed to unsafe water supply, inadequate sanitation and hygiene.

I say again, with apologies to those flood victims to whom it might sound flippant: how very lucky we are.

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